Latay, starring Lovi Poe and Allen Dizon, is a shocking film not because it is partly about a battered husband. After all, some husbands do deserve to be given a dose of their own medicine by their wives, and it is not fiction that there are couples who live that way.
In July last year, PBA Party-list Rep. Margarita “Migs” Nograles filed a bill that seeks to expand Republic Act 9262, otherwise known as the Anti-Violence Against Women and their Children Act, so it may cover the male equivalent of battered and abused wives.
The bill is based on statistics that one in five men in the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 49 years has experienced domestic violence.
The bill, though, remains pending at the Lower House.
What is disturbing about Latay is how the film’s director-scriptwriter (Ralston Jover) decided to end the story. It is not a documentary, so as director-scriptwriter, Jover is in a position to end the film any way he decides.
It is good that the film made by BG Productions International is being reissued in cinemas beginning 8 February in time with the airing of the Kapamilya network’s latest series Batang Quiapo starting 13 February. Poe plays leading lady to Coco Martin.
The TV series is mainly set in hoi-polloi Quiapo, just as Latay tells a story that transpires mostly in a nondescript fishing village in Pampanga. Those who doubt that Poe can convincingly portray a poor character in congested Quiapo are likely to get impressed with her delineation of an impoverished fish wife in Latay.
Poe did Latay back in 2019, and it had very limited cinema screenings in the country. It had more runs in international film festivals where it would win several awards. Among its triumphs are: Gold Award, Wallachi International Film Fest in Romania; best screenplay, Queens World Film Festival, New York; best director, Foreign Language Feature Fusion International Film Festival, Poland; the Silver Remi for Best Mature/Adult theme feature, WorldFest, Houston; Awards of Excellence in Direction, Award of Excellence in Acting for Allen Dizon, 7th Art Independent Film Festival in India; and Best Global Feature Film, 10th International Film Festival, Manhattan, New York.
Lovi Poe
Stunning features
In Latay, Poe is a jealous wife, and it’s during fits of jealousy that she hits her husband (Dizon) with anything and everything she can lay her hands on in their penurious hut. The husband allows this setup since the wife ends up ministrating on his bumps and bruises, and all the hurts and pain are forgotten until the next fit explodes.
But make no mistake about it, the husband himself is very much capable of violence toward others.
Also in the cast are Snooky Serna as Poe’s loquacious mother and Soliman Cruz as Dizon’s near-alcoholic father.
Mariel de Leon, daughter of actors Christopher de Leon and Sandy Andolong, is also in the cast as Poe’s best friend. The young De Leon was crowned Binibining Pilipinas International two years ago.
Poe is rarely asked to portray destitute characters possibly because of her strong and stunning features. In 2009, in a film ironically titled Sagrada Familia, she played the daughter of a woman who has to work abroad, leaving her with her father who would turn out to be a rapist. The film was directed by Joel Lamangan from the script of the well-admired Racquel Villavicencio. (Incidentally, Serna also portrayed Poe’s mother in Sagrada Familia.)
The following year, Poe won Best Actress in the New Breed category of the Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival of the Cultural Center of the Philippines for Mayohan, about a stunningly lovely provincial lass who wants to escape rural poverty and is not beyond buying herself a nice cellphone from her collection of donated funds for a traditional dance event in their town.
Global filmfests
Jover has been one of the country’s notable film directors since 2009, though he began as a scriptwriter in 2006. He has so far directed about 20 movies, but since his screenplays and films are of the social awareness kind, none seems to have been a hit in the box-office. He has written scripts for Brillante Mendoza films, including some that made it to Cannes, and for Jeffrey Jeturian.
Jover has also directed other films for BG Productions, which won awards in hardly publicized and promoted international film festivals. Some of them were topbilled by Dizon, the Pinoy actor who has clinched the most acting awards from largely unpromoted global film competitions.
Poe is a daughter of former beauty queen and sometime actor Rowena Moran. The late Fernando Poe Jr. secretly fathered Moran a child after they did the film Kapag Puno na ang Salop in 1987 (Lovi was born on 11 February 1989).
As we write this, a press preview and grand media conference for Coco Martin’s Batang Quiapo have been scheduled in two separate venues in Quezon City. The new series is inspired by the Batang Quiapo film of FPJ and Maricel Soriano in 1986, where Da King portrayed a retired pickpocket in Quiapo.
Martin seems to have been blessed with the virtual privilege of using FPJ movies and characters in his ABS-CBN series. FPJ’s widow, Susan Roces, sold to ABS-CBN the TV rights for remakes and TV adaptations of a bunch of the films of her husband who died 18 years ago. Martin co-produced with ABS-CBN the series FPJ’s Ang Probinsyano which aired for a mighty seven years and was only occasionally toppled from being number 1 in the ratings all through those years. Roces herself appeared in the series as the grandmother of Ricardo Dalisay, the policeman lead character of the series.